Email: angela.mcclean@yale.edu
Office: 350 Rosenkranz Hall
115 Prospect Street, New Haven CT
Welcome! I am a lecturer in Sociology and East Asian Studies at Yale University.
I study migration, refugee governance, and the politics of membership. My research focuses on South Korea, where I examine how bureaucratic and legal institutions shape the experiences of people seeking refugee protection, and what the gap between law on paper and law in practice reveals about the politics of belonging.
My current book project asks how a state can build a refugee protection system rooted in legal commitments under both international and domestic law and yet recognize almost no refugees. I argue that the answer lies not in the law itself but in the administrative apparatus between law and outcomes — where delays, economic restrictions, and procedural attrition do the quiet work of exclusion.
My recent work has appeared or forthcoming in International Migration Review, International Political Sociology, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies among other venues.
At Yale, I teach courses on international migration, East Asian migration, South Korean politics and society, and politics of power, marginalization, and resistance.
Before joining Yale, I was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. Prior to that, I served as a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and as a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan.